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Dabbling
Dabbling is a term used for practicing a school of magic without having much experience with it. These practitioners are called Dabblers. :Where is the line drawn in the sand that separates Dabblers from Practitioners? What makes The knights of the basement different from the Sisters of the Flame even though the knights have taken on Ur (tried to, at least) and can fight side by side with Blake? Mainly the depth, breadth, and quality of knowledge they have access to. Nothing's stopping them from getting stuck in pretty intense or dangerous situations. The lack of depth, breadth, and quality knowledge may hamper them in getting out of said situations, mind. ... "'- What do Dabblers have in terms of resources that religions that try to practice magic like Wicca's don't? On one side we have people who do magic mainly as a side hobby and they can help fight demons, goblins and incarnates, and on the other there are people who dedicate a large part of themselves to the idea of magic but would probably be lucky to get a "hey" from a ghost.' Someone or something opened the door. ... :What exactly is the fatality rate among Dabblers? I mean, the occult doesn't exactly draw your average Joes, so are incidents like "Edgy kid tries to summon a demon to get revenge on Chad (but has the resources to do it right)", breaking a vow when they're still fresh at the practice and becoming forsworn, or anything else that would be haphazard in a vein similar to that happen frequently? Not the demon thing - that's often avoided, but those incidents can be engineered. Goes back to what I said above about curses and others, and the sole survivors. The wrong kind of practices can be a curse unto themselves, and spreading knowledge with steep enough prices can be just as sure a doom as any curse. The Fae spread knowledge of how to enter a realm of the faerie, elevating people to dabbler, and an excited group of friends go back and forth in longer and longer visits to the fae realms... until the group starts dwindling in size. A fatality rate is a hard thing to nail down, though. Varies wildly from place to place and circumstance to circumstance. ... :What does your average dabbler look like in terms of familiar, implement or demesnes (if they even have any)? Depends on family strength. Top tier = probably all 3 by the time they're old. Keeping in mind that the three major elements are answers to really big questions about who you are, what your place in life is, and who you interact with, most don't have answers to these questions until they're older. People change careers at least once in their life, nowadays, and I would gently posit that most who try to rush to get familiar, implement, and demesnes before they're 35 is going to come to regret it. More out of Curiosity, but how would Dabblers play out in Pactdice? Weak Family, maybe/probably weak across other areas as well. I might posit Dabblers as a way of filling a gap in the group/campaign. If your Augur leaves and your group's Chosen isn't really focusing on the Divine side of things, maybe you drop the player in as a Priest dabbler, with some advance knowledge of the campaign, lower rankings in some categories, and some other perks. Part of the reason Pact Dice is organized with schools and players eliminating schools as they do is that it keeps the bases covered. It encourages sharing of resources and leaning on one another for answers. Councils want the bases covered, and much as Kayleigh was brought on to study Binding and watch out for things from the realms of death, sleep, ruin, memory, etc, people will be called in (or pulled in by a vacuum) to fill roles. - A comment by Wildbow on reddit“And?” I asked. “You focus in? You do…” “We dabble. All of us dabble. We’re with the council, because it means we don’t get blindsided if something comes up or changes, easier access if we want to check it’s okay to grab a certain demesne or get a familiar. Maybe once in a while we can do a favor for a bit of knowledge or a trinket.” “You’re dabblers,” I said, “As in… you don’t have much firepower?” ... They were small fry. Dabbling practitioners. “Is it normal, to be…” I searched for a word. “Low level?” the kid asked. “To work within such a small scope,” I said, a little more diplomatically. “Not sure,” Shotgun said. ... “Tomorrow night, at midnight, it comes to a head. You help me, and I’ll give you access to my family’s resources, minus the… troubling books. The books I don’t particularly want to read.” “Meaning we wouldn’t be dabblers,” he said. “We could be…” “A lot of things,” I said. “I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t at least one good book on every major subject and discipline.” “I can see the appeal,” Shotgun said. “It’s an option,” I said. “But, and I’d have to talk to the other Knights for their opinions, I’m quite comfortable being a dabbler. A group of low-key people who lucked into more mysterious things.” He glanced at his familiar. “Don’t have to stick our noses in too deep, don’t have any pressure. No enemies, not a whole lot to fear, outside of our one big fuckup to date. We get to be excited if, a couple of times a year, we get a new book, a new doo-dad, and we can explore it together.” “Then…” I said, reaching for an answer. “You want less? Not access to a whole library, but maybe a guarantee of a book once in a blue moon?” Shotgun looked at the others. I saw one or two shrugs and some nods. - excerpt from Collateral 4.10 Some dabblers in one field are established and powerful practitioners in another field of magic,“That should provide a bit of privacy,” Laird said. He sipped his coffee. “We tend to learn a few tricks, because it’s expedient. This one is a bit of shamanism. Many of the circles here and there will look down on someone for dabbling. It’s dangerous, and it leads to more mistakes. It’s better, many say, to specialize, do one thing well. The Duchamp family there seems to hold to this idea. The Behaim family doesn’t.”” ... “He has other tricks up his sleeve,” Rose said. “Having a focus doesn’t mean you can’t do something else.” “He said he dabbled in a variety of things,” I said. “But there’s too much we don’t know on that front, I’d go crazy trying to figure it out.” - excerpt from Bonds 1.5 but generally a "dabbler" refers to someone with very little magical knowledge, who simply stumbled across some minor piece of of the supernatural. Are they almost always recruited and trained by Others or Practitioners in some fashion akin to Maggie's situation , do they stumble across a strange antique shop with conveniently bizarre items, or are books like essentials mass produced (and if that's the case then why don't people like Maggie who don't have a lot of texts pirate them) ? This is a pretty complex question. So... It's karmically risky to clue people in. You essentially own their mistakes. This is in effect to encourage keeping the damage contained, and Others are encouraged to follow it. This is both the case explicitly, via. Solomon's oath, and to a lesser degree through ambient convention: because it's enforced and obeyed by just about everyone, just about everyone suffers if they don't obey or help enforce. Others are generally limited from targeting and hunting the uninitiated, and they're limited by this karmic risk. A wraith can hunt and kill people, but if those people get away, the wraith can suffer for it. If those people get away with proof, it's a disaster for the wraith. This includes corroborating witnesses - which is why the sole survivor trope is a thing. For Others that feed on propagating fear (Bogeymen) or spreading like living curses (some Wraiths, dark Fae), it's fine or even encouraged to have one person get away, if that person can't prove anything and they still spread the word or sow doubt. By a similar token, cursed items are often put out there with a design that puts them in the hands of people who aren't going to go to the media. High schoolers are often a favored target, as they tend to be wrapped up in their own world, not so young as to be innocent, but young enough to make bad decisions. The item promises power with a drawback or makes the person the architect of their own demise, and through the sacrifice or built-in ritual, the item gathers power which then goes back to the item's creator (if it doesn't feed back into the item itself). The effect is somewhat like fishing. Many sole survivors and people who have cursed items pass through their hands come away with some knowledge. In a way, when one is caught in the vortex of a powerful Other, curse, or cursed object, the information relating to that Other or curse becomes more available. Safeguards in dealing with the awakened come off and suddenly it's easier to find info on Mares, Bogeymen, Wraiths, Goblins, or whatever it is that's after you, well-meaning practitioners may be more able to share info (and to notice), etc. There's a window of opportunity given that many of these hunters or curses want to take their time... the high entry cost for initiating a hunt means they don't want to wrap it up or be inefficient. For example, Kayleigh woke up from a nightmare to find herself paralyzed, what looked like a naked homeless woman sitting on her chest and staring her in the eyes, the woman's 30-foot tongue sticking about 29 feet down Kayleigh's throat. After several repeat incidents, each nightmare and summary waking-up worse than the last, she connects the dots of recurring elements in her nightmares (which are becoming things she sees while awake), finds the one girl at her college who remembers a fairy tale they heard growing up in South America, does her own research, and captures the Mare. What happens next? Kayleigh knows weird things exist. She might aim to forget. But if the area has a stable council, then the local lord(s) might reach out, acknowledging that there's a gap in the local council's knowledge that let the Mare slip through. They offer to initiate Kayleigh if she'll keep an eye out in the future. Kayleigh gets some basic knowledge, a basic awakening, and some loose contacts, with some connection to other practitioners of a loosely appropriate stripe for her new duties. There's a kind of security that comes with that knowledge, following a nightmarish period of time. ...Which answers about half of that question. But I chose Kayleigh's example because it leads into the second half neatly. Generally, councils have duties and things that they're doing. Part of these duties include protecting people. Some councils and areas are set up to keep something contained, to keep an eye on the future or keep wards up, to keep track of a phenomena (a crossroads dangerous Others tend to pass through, a font of goblins, a place where reality is just a bit thinner), or because people in that area are more vulnerable for some reason. Sometimes a certain town is just the only town within a 1000 mile radius that doesn't have anyone keeping an eye out for more violent Others. Practitioner families are often families because families offer a stability and families self-perpetuate. That self-perpetuation is a counter to the fact that many Others are immortal and can simply bide their time until their nemesis dies. But sometimes families can't keep going. Stuff goes wrong, the Others play a long game and the family finds itself infertile. If the danger or the need is severe enough, then practitioners of a dying or ended family may simply take measures to ensure that essential knowledge spreads and that 1000 mile radius has its protection from Least gods, wraiths, or goblins. They adopt the karmic backlash because if they don't, the harm will be much greater. To balance this out, they may have some second-stringers prepared and groomed, gradually easing them into the knowledge and ensuring that they won't spread the knowledge once they're initiated. Sometimes those second stringers become full practitioners. Sometimes the people preparing them die (or are eliminated) prematurely, the information, tools, or libraries they were to inherit are lost or destroyed, and the second stringers end up dabblers, with a responsibility foisted on them. But just because the council is working with them doesn't mean that the council has the means of elevating them above dabblers (or the willingness to share family secrets). Instead, it ends up being a situation where they say "Hey Matt, your theology tutor had a certain responsibility that he's passing onto you. There's a cave just outside of town, something lives in that cave, and we don't know what she is. We do know that she grinds kid's bones into dust while those bones are still inside the kids. If you don't step up and figure out how to set up the wards to keep her in there, that pain and suffering is on your head. Here's a copy of Essentials, we really hope your mentor taught you something." Sometimes the powers that be have an interest in keeping a certain practitioner as a dabbler. If Matt is stationed as a warden with a duty of setting up essential wards, the local council may not want him to get the knowledge to be anything more than the guy who keeps a certain Other contained and gets killed first if she gets out. In another case, it could be that a lesser god wants a practitioner as a priest but doesn't want that practitioner to know enough to start making demands or bucking the god's rules. And lastly, of course, you get the cases where banks foreclose on a house and sell the property, and the deceased practitioner's books do enter circulation. Sometimes this is intentional, second-stringers set up without the effort. By the time councils finish the cleanup job, a book can be in someone's hands, and the council may not have the ability or willingness to take the books away. - A comment by Wildbow on reddit“Eric is Stan’s brother. They’re not major practitioners. But they had an extensive library with texts we needed access to. If it was a little bit larger, we might call them something more impressive than dabblers. But it isn’t. They’re collectors.” - excerpt from Execution 13.5 Someone who uses multiple arts to greater effect, rather than mere bits and pieces, is a Sorcerer rather than a dabbler. Methodology Dabbling is rather dangerous, since you're interacting with Others without either the protections Innocence can bring, or the magical knowledge and power to protect yourself. However, it does offer more flexibility than ordinary practice, and dabblers often serve to cover bases that are being neglected by their allies. Dabbling includes everything from Shamanism to Diabolism and everything in-between, with the primary point being that they neither excel nor flourish in the field they're practicing. Recently inducted practitioners without much support can be called dabblers. This includes: people who get recruited after surviving an encounter with Others or cursed item, people who were being prepared to replace another practitioner but were prematurely thrust into the magical world, and innocent people who have managed to buy a copy of Essentials. Dabbling is frowned upon by some practitioners, due to the fact that it is dangerous and leads to more mistakes if you aren't careful, and the practitioner isn't showing commitment and trying to master a specific field (even if they have more proficiency in one than another.) Notable Dabblers *Behaim Circle *Knights of the Basement *Blake Thorburn *Ritchie brothersCarter Duchamp, PyromancerLandon Michaelsson, Spellbinder Gudbrand, Valkalla Crooked Hat, Scourge Eric Ritchie, Dabbler Stan Ritchie, Dabbler Mason Hall-McCullough the Benevolent ... “Eric is Stan’s brother. They’re not major practitioners. But they had an extensive library with texts we needed access to. If it was a little bit larger, we might call them something more impressive than dabblers. But it isn’t. They’re collectors.” - excerpt from Execution 13.5The two brothers were somewhere in the crowd too, but being dabblers, they lacked any discerning marks, and were hard to pick out. I looked for men who could be brothers, but didn’t see anything. - Excerpt from Execution 13.6 * Mann, Levinn, and Lewis Firm Chauffeur“I honestly don’t know if you will. That wasn’t what I was saying. There are a good few people out there who try dealing in the real powers, the scary ones your grandmother trafficked in. Maybe a third survive, like your grandmother did. Another third, they meet bad ends and they probably take people with them. The last third, they get offered a way out, and they take that offer.” “Like you did,” I said. “I dabbled, I got in just deep enough to get into trouble, and get into debt,” he said. - Excerpt from Collateral 4.1 Category:Magic Category:Basic Information Category:Practices